Gender Block: She Asked For It

I decided I need to become better at public speaking so I’ve started subjecting myself to the horror of, well, public speaking. I started as a guest speaker at a Durham Rape Crisis Centre volunteer training session, my second and most recent attempt was a literary reading at Oshawa, Ont.’s The LivingRoom Community Art Studio.

While writing my reading piece “She Asked For It” I was thinking about all the bystanders who watch their friends/sisters/peers get physically and verbally abused by their partner, or the adults who don’t stand up for abused children. I was thinking, too, about the public backlash women receive when coming forward about abuse, especially publicly like in the cases of Jian Gomeshi and Bill Cosby. There is this strange obsession to defend the most popular and charming, and this terrifies me. Almost as much as public speaking.

Here is the written piece read that evening:

She Asked For It

It seems so obvious to the outsider, get hurt, you go.

And that’s what makes them outsiders: the dichotomy of you and them.

So when that person makes those fists – just like dad used to make – and they tell you it isn’t just you and them, it is the two of you against the world, that’s all you got.

White trash can’t get hurt.

As Other, they can not feel.

The beatings and mockery vye for what hurts most, but don’t dare take first place from isolation.

We need you!

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